Gay couple are flogged more than 80 times for having sex and a woman is battered for selling booze in front of bloodthirsty Indonesian crowd
All 15 victims were beaten with canes outside a mosque in the country's Aceh province after being found guilty of violating Shariah law
A GAY couple were brutally flogged today in front of a bloodthirsty crowd for having sex with each other in Indonesia's ultra conservative Muslim province.
The terrified men were lashed 86 times after being hunted by a sick homophobic mob earlier this year in Aceh in the north of the Asian country.
Several hundred people, including a group of Malaysian tourists, watched 15 people being mercilessly caned after Friday prayers outside the Baiturrahim Mosque.
Some of those watching in the baying crowd reportedly shouted "flog them harder" as the prisoners were savagely beaten.
All the victims had been found guilty of violating Shariah law, despite authorities pledging not to carry out the punishment in public.
Captured by residents in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh, the gay men were initially sentenced to 90 lashes which was reduced to 86 for the four months they spent in jail.
The other 13 victims - who were caned 13 to 27 times - included couples punished for showing affection in public and people caught drinking or selling alcohol.
In April, Aceh's then-governor Irwandi Yusuf signed a memorandum with the head of the provincial Law and Human Rights office, stipulating that caning can only take place inside prisons or other places of detention.
The number of witnesses was expected to be much smaller than the hundreds who regularly cheered the outdoor proceedings.
Muhammad Hidayat, the chief of the city security office, said the punishment was still being held publicly "because there was no technical guidance yet" about how to carry out the canings inside prisons.
He said: "The authority of caning within the prisons is on the hand of the prosecutors office.”
Erwin Desman, head of the Banda Aceh prosecutors office, said his office has not yet received guidance from the Law and Human Rights Ministry about preparing prisons to be a venue for the canings.
The pledge had followed international condemnation of the caning last year of two men for consensual gay sex.
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That public display in May 2017 intensified an anti-gay backlash in the world's most populous Muslim country, and human rights activists denounced the punishment as "medieval torture."
Aceh is the only province in Muslim-majority Indonesia that practices Shariah law, a concession made by the central government in 2001 as part of efforts to end a decades-long war for independence.
Hundreds of people have been publicly caned since the punishment was introduced in Aceh in 2005.
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